When Has Breast-feeding Gone On Too Long?

Leslie Massow remembers the first time she saw an older child breast-feeding. He appeared to be 4 years old, and his mother was leading a La Leche League meeting Massow was attending.

"He lifted his mother's shirt while she was doing the meeting, jumped on her lap and helped himself," said Massow, of Naperville, who is nursing her third child and nursed her second until he was 16 months. "I remember going home and thinking, 'Whoa, that was kind of strange.' "

The sight of a child well beyond infancy suckling at the breast is so rare in this country that it can be jarring, even for someone like Massow, who does not oppose it.

The usually hidden phenomenon has come into the open with the case of the Champaign mother whose 6-year-old son has been removed from her home because she was still breast-feeding him, allegedly against his wishes.

Saying that the boy faces "enormous potential for emotional harm," Champaign County Judge Ann A. Einhorn questioned whether his mother was using him to serve her own needs. The judge ruled that he should remain in foster care at least until another hearing Dec. 27.

Experts and families are divided on the possible benefits and risks of long-term breast-feeding.

"Most people are shocked at it," said Dr. Lawrence Gartner, head of the American Academy of Pediatrics' breast-feeding task force and an adviser to La Leche League International, the Schaumburg-based nursing information and support organization.

He doesn't believe they should be.

"There is no evidence at all that prolonged breast-feeding has any ill effect, psychologically or developmentally, on children," he said.

Other authorities think there could be.

"It's a wonderful closeness with your kid; it's something mothers exclusively can do with their kids. . . . It's a neat thing," said Dr. Karen Pierce, child psychiatrist at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago. "But you have to be sure that you're doing it not to meet your own needs, but to meet your kid's needs. If you're meeting your closeness needs with your kid, and not with friends, a spouse or yourself, that's a problem."

The mainstream medical guideline on nursing is open-ended. The American Academy of Pediatrics urges mothers to breast-feed for at least a year, and beyond that "for as long as mutually desired."

But in this country, only 16 percent of mothers still are breast-feeding their children at 12 months, according to the 1998 Ross Mothers Survey, the most recent installment of an annual survey compiled by a manufacturer of infant formula.

Women who have nursed older children have bristled at the Champaign case, which they see as state interference in a private parenting issue.

"It is a personal decision, what the mom feels is best," said Jody Conry, 38, of Streamwood, co-leader of a La Leche group, who nursed three of her five children till they were 4 1/2.

A child cannot be breast-fed against his will, said her co-leader, Jane Crouse, 40, of Streamwood, who nursed one of her three children until she was 3 1/2.

"You can't force the act on them," she said. "If they're not going to eat, they will shut their mouth; they will turn away. You cannot force a child to go on the breast and suck, at any age."

Conry took issue with state investigators' framing the issue as one of sexual abuse in the case of the 6-year-old.

"It's more a peacefulness, a closeness with your child, a special way to connect with them," she said. "For some women, at some times, there may be a hint of a sexual pleasant feeling, but it's not arousing or anything like that."

"How they could interpret it as sexual abuse is confusing," said Liz Kuhn of Naperville. Her 2-year-old nursing son, she said, insists on modesty.

The rarity of extended breast-feeding indicates that most mothers do not feel comfortable with it.

Catherine Thompson, 31, of Plainfield, who weaned her first child at 11 months, had no wish to breast-feed her daughter into preschool age.

"I knew she wouldn't need it nutritionally, and, yes, I wanted my own body back," she said. "And I also wanted to [establish] that she is a child and I am a mommy and we are not one.

"My own personal philosophy is that they need to also start learning how to cope and deal with things on their own."

Conry has a different philosophy.

"I think our society puts pressure on people to wean early . . . to make their child independent as soon as possible," she said. "It makes sense to me that if we let the child fulfill these dependency needs when they're small, then they won't have to act it out in other ways when they're older."

She said she simply let her children nurse when they asked, and they kept asking. "We kept cutting down gradually, nursing every other day or a couple of times a week, until I could say, `Well, when you decide it's time to wean, then we'll go out and get a special present and it'll be a special thing.'